JAMB Arrest 19-Year-Old For Upgrading UTME Score

The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) on Monday evening paraded one Adah Eche, a 19-year-old admission seeker who allegedly falsified his Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) result.

Prof.Is-haq Oloyede, JAMB’s Registrar, paraded the suspect before newsmen at the board’s Headquarters in Bwari, Abuja.

Oloyede said that the suspect, who sat for the 2019 UTME scored 153, but decided to connive with an examination syndicate who allegedly increased his scores.

He explained that the suspect was apprehended after a delegation of Public Complaints Commission paid the board a visit following various complaints by aggrieved candidates who sat for the 2019 UTME.

“We decided to pick three out of the complainants to address their issues and he happened to be the first person we picked and he actually wrote a letter of complaint to us knowingfully well that he faked his result.

“What we did was invite him to come and pick his admission letter and he came.

“Now, what such people do not know is that we have a barcode for every result which helps us verify its authenticity, but this fake one has the barcode of a supermarket and was saying invalid barcode on our own platform.

“We have checked our own platform and seen where he has checked his result three consecutive times via 55019 and was replied same with his original result which is 153, yet he insists that he did not know the one with 290 was fake,” he said.

Oloyede further explained that the suspect confessed to the crime after many evidences were discovered from his phone and another on his computer where he faked 200 score for himself first, before upgrading it to 290.

He also said that the fake result had an imposed ‘55019’ as the sender of the result.

According to him, a trail of transactions where the suspect collected money from others and sent to his counterpart for the upgrade of UTME scores was discovered on a whatsapp platform on his phone.

“He was collecting money from others, we have the transactions on his phone where some send N5000, seeking assistance and sending him their registration number, email addresses and all necessary details to help upgrade their scores.

“These are the same people who cry foul saying they didn’t see their results or they didn’t sit for the examination yet have scores.

“These people do not know we have installed features that help us track all these things that is why we insist that aggrieved candidates should come to us with the proof and credentials and we will sort this out, yet they refuse,” he said.

The Registrar said that the board’s website “www.jamb.org” had a platform where people could lodge in their complaints and the board was working on a daily basis to ensure that the issues were responded to at all cost.

“So far, we have treated 36,275 tickets that were raised from the platform, 36,247 have been closed and we have just 28 issues that were yet to be resolved.

” For instance, today alone, we had 143 queries out of which we treated 118, only 25 have not been treated.

”We continue to ask that all issues should be raised online and we will treat these on a daily basis, yet people prefer to gatecrash,” he said.

Oloyede said the suspect would be handed over to the police, and the board, would track and also apprehend others involved in the illicit act.

The suspect, Adah Eche, who said that he wrote his UTME at Veritas University Centre, Bwari, also said that he was writing the examination for the first time.

According to him, his result was delayed and was not released on time, so he posted on Facebook that he had not seen his result and another Facebook user decided to assist him to get the result.

” I have never met the man before but he promised to assist me get the result and he asked me to send him N2000 which I did and he sent the result to me via Whatsapp.

“He later asked me to send N3000 so that he can submit the result for me but after I did, he never picked my calls again, he blocked me on whatsapp and later, his number was not connecting.

”I didn’t know it was a fake result, he also asked me to inform others and let them send money so that he could help them do the upgrade too, that’s why those transactions are there.

”I didn’t know one could write the examination more than once or else, I would not have tried this or I would have used the 153 to seek for admission in the polytechnic, but it was the man that convinced me.

”My advice to others is that they should stop such illicit acts, there’s no such thing as JAMB upgrade.”